Of course, ProfHackers also tend to like digital tools, both in our teaching and research, and such digital scholarship ends up being a challenge when it comes time for the tenure and promotion process. How do you talk about blogging in your tenure documents? Will the committee accept your co-authored essay in a open access journal? What about the code that you shared on GitHub? These are important questions but hard to answer–both for individual faculty and the departments who hire them.

The guidelines represent the MLA’s awareness that the evaluation of digital work is problematic at present and will hopefully help departments and individuals know what their responsibilities are when engaging with this work. Specifically, departments are encouraged to make clear how digital work will be counted; to engage qualified reviewers during the tenure and promotion process; examine digital scholarship in its original form; and remain aware of accessibility affordances.

It’s not just the institutions that need to accommodate new digital work, however. According to these guidelines, individual faculty members should ask about and negotiate for clear guidelines for how their work will be evaluated; understand what support they will have from the department; and be prepared to document and explain their work and their role within collaborations to T&P committees. It falls on the faculty member, then, to “sho[w] the relevance of their work in terms of the traditional areas of teaching, research, and service.”

The MLA naturally has no power to enforce these guidelines on different departments. Still, these guidelines will hopefully assist departments looking for assistance in crafting policies to better count the digital work done by their faculty. And even if you don’t belong to a field that studies modern languages or literatures, you might be able to start a conversation in your own discipline by referring to this work.

Will the MLA’s Guidelines help as you prepare for promotion and tenure? Do you think they go too far or not far enough? Let us know in the comments!

ProfHacker Writers

Amy Cavender is a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, and Associate Professor of Political Science and interim Director of the Center for Academic Innovation at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana.